


Take my hand (and we'll march to the front lines)

by masterofmidgets



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:42:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21816103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofmidgets/pseuds/masterofmidgets
Summary: There's a dream Vers has sometimes.
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau
Comments: 11
Kudos: 71
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Take my hand (and we'll march to the front lines)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meadow Lion (Meadow_Lion)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meadow_Lion/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Meadow Lion!

There’s a dream Vers has sometimes, around the edges of her nightmares.

She’s flying, like most of her dreams, but in this one she doesn’t crash. Instead of the glossy touch-panels of a Kree ship there’s a throttle in her hand, and the thrill burns through her as she pushes its limits, pulling up in a tight arc before her plane screams across the desert. Then there’s a voice in her ear, crackly and distant, and she brings it back around to the strip to land, and as she touches down she knows there’s someone waiting for her on the ground. 

If this were real it would be Yon-Rogg, waiting to patiently talk her through all her mistakes, but it’s not. As she yanks her helmet off and heaves herself out of the cockpit Vers can feel the grin on her face, see the answering one on – the name is right there, just out of reach, like someone calling from the other room – Vers reaches out a hand to pull her closer – everything in her is shouting that she knows her but she can’t –

She wakes up, the taste of swallowed tears thick in the back of her throat. By the time she gets to the practice hall the memory of the woman’s face has already dissolved back into the dream, and she spends the rest of the night running hand-to-hand drills until the ache of it starts to fade.

*

There’s a dream Maria has sometimes, when she’s given in and let Monica pull out the box of photos to look through again.

She’s just landed, a textbook first run on one of Lawson’s prototypes. The sky is perfectly clear and the October sun is golden on the tarmac and Carol is waiting for her when she climbs out of the plane, arms crossed over her flight suit. “Looked pretty hot up there,” she shouts, grinning, and Maria pulls her closer, not quite a hug.

“You know it,” she says, and Carol squeezes her hand. Just that, and it fizzes through her until she feels as light as pitching into a dive, as light as freefall. Until she doesn’t want to do anything but kiss her, run her fingers through her hair, shove her against a wall and touch every part of her, kiss her, kiss her. 

When this was real she bit it back until they were off-duty, until they were alone, but this time she can’t wait. “Stay,” she whispers while she presses kisses against Carol’s skin, while she tangles their fingers together, but she knows – she knows –

She wakes up, her hands clenched tight and pressed to her mouth so she doesn’t make a sound. When she stops shaking she gets up and finds one of Carol’s shirts in the bottom drawer, one of the few she kept instead of giving to Monica. She can still remember how Carol smelled, sweat and leather when she’d been on a bike, the smell of the airfield that never came out of their flight suits. It’s been long enough now that the t-shirt only smells like laundry soap, but she curls around it and pretends.

*

It takes most of the night for Norex to jury-rig the quadjet. They see Monica off with her grandparents, but before Maria can get her into the car she runs back for one more hug from Carol, wrapping both arms around her and squeezing her until her curls shake. 

“After you and mom save everyone, we can take you out for ice cream,” Monica says. “That’s what we do when I win softball games.”

If she tries, Carol thinks she can almost remember ice cream, cold and sweet on her tongue like the taste of a dream, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. She squeezes Monica back. “You’re going to have to help me pick my favorite flavor.”

“Love you, Auntie Carol,” she says, face buried in her uniform, and as tough as she’s been Carol can feel her shoulders trembling a little. 

“Love you too, Lieutenant.” 

Monica finally pulls herself away, and as Carol watches her run back to her mom, thin shoulders wrapped in Carol’s jacket, she’s so angry she can’t breathe. Yon-Rogg used to give her exercises to do, meditation and breathing and counting and hitting the same spot over and over again. He said it would help her learn to control herself, and remembering that now makes her want to fly back to Hala and blast the whole practice hall into glass.

Six years, she could have had this, ice cream and softball and a _family_ , but the Kree took it all, and gave her nothing back but lies and a war she should never have been a part of.

Carol – Vers – _Carol_ sits back down on the steps. Distantly she hears Maria’s parents’ car pull out of the driveway and footsteps coming back from the side of the house, and then Maria sits down next to her. The moon is rising over the hangar in the yard, and it’s surprisingly easy to sit in silence with just the two of them.

“Pretty great kid you got there,” she says, when she finally trusts herself to speak again. 

“Well, I had a little bit of help,” Maria replies, nudging her with her shoulder.

“Tell me about it,” she says, and even to her own ears she can hear how wistful it sounds. “I mean, really. Tell me? Something fun we used to do together.”

“Do they have fun in the Kree Empire? Or is it just –” she waves a hand, taking in Carol and her suit, the Skrulls, everything that’s happened since she showed up. “– this, all the time?”

When she had recovered from the crash, Yon-Rogg had shown her around Kree-Lar, wanting her to become familiar with her adopted home; Hala wasn’t exactly a pleasure planet, but the city had its fair share of watering holes, theatres, and fighting arenas. No one had told her she couldn’t explore on her own. But Yon-Rogg rarely descended from the Starforce base except on official business, and she took her lead from him, throwing herself into training and ignoring the times Minn-Erva pointedly didn’t invite her along for drinks with the rest of the team. 

“I...didn’t get out much,” she says wryly. She hadn’t let it bother her at the time, too many other things to worry about. But in those flashes of memory when the Skrulls had worked on her – memories of Maria, she knows now – she was so _happy_. 

“OK,” Maria says, leaning back on her hands. “We – you and I – took Monica to the roller rink for her fifth birthday. For some reason that I’m sure had absolutely nothing to do with you, Lawson didn’t need us for any tests that day, so we were both able to get leave. Monica wouldn’t talk about anything else for weeks, she was so excited. And as soon as we got out there, she was off, doing circles around us. But you – you were _so_ bad at it.”

“How bad are we talking?” She tries to picture it, to make the image fit together into a memory, and for once it almost feels within reach. 

“Two feet and you were on your ass. And you pulled yourself back up and made it two more feet before you were on your ass again.”

“Did you tell me to slow down?” she asks. 

“What do you think?”

Carol looks at her. It sounds like a joke, but her eyes say it isn’t. “I don’t think you ever did,” she says slowly. “I think you egged me on to go faster.”

“Right,” Maria says, and her smile is genuine, even if there’s still something painful behind it. “But I did take enough pity on you to keep helping you up. Until you finally pulled me down on top of you.”

“That’s what you get for leaving yourself open,” she says, grinning. She can feel her face flushing, and she isn’t sure why.

“Low blow, Danvers, low blow.” But she’s laughing now, and it makes something tight unknot in Carol’s chest. 

She hadn’t bothered to test Maria, to make sure she wasn’t a Skrull. It wasn’t impossible for the Skrulls to have beaten them to her house; it certainly hadn’t taken Talos long to show up afterwards. But she had known, as soon as Maria turned around and saw her in the yard. No one could have faked that. And the desperate, yearning look that had flashed across her face then had stayed in the back of her eyes while she told Carol what had happened to her, while they had listened to the crash, while she had agreed to fly into space to fight aliens for the sake of a woman who doesn’t remember knowing her. She doesn’t want to be the reason Maria looks like that, when she should be laughing with her instead. 

“I’m glad I found you,” she says abruptly. If Maria’s name hadn’t been in the file, if she hadn’t seen it – she doesn’t know where they would have ended up, after they fled the Air Force base, but she knows she wouldn’t have found anyone she trusts this much. “Thanks for being here. Thanks for letting me drag you into this.”

“You’ve never dragged me anywhere I didn’t want to go with you,” Maria says quietly. 

Carol reaches over and lays her hand over Maria’s, lacing their fingers together. Maria doesn’t say anything at that, but she doesn’t pull back, either, and the two of them sit together while they watch the stars fill the sky.

*

They’re halfway back to Louisiana with the refugees before Maria’s heart stops pounding. It’s been years since she’s been behind the controls on anything bigger than her Cessna but this feeling never changes, everything too bright and too real, sharpened by adrenaline. She’s never regretted walking away from the Air Force after the crash but she missed this more than she can say, the certainty of the moment when the ground fell away and there was nothing but her and the plane and the mission in front of her. And Carol. 

Every few minutes she drifts in front of the canopy into view, easily keeping pace with them, and Maria has to hold back her surprise every time she sees her out of the corner of her eye. Carol can _fly_ now – fly, throw warheads bare-handed, scare off a fleet of Kree warships like she used to scare off macho jerks at the bar – and she can’t even begin to get her head wrapped around it, but none of it matters as much as how right it felt to be flying together again. Even if she was the only one in a plane. 

For six years she hasn’t had anyone she could trust to watch her back the way she used to trust Carol, and she knows she will never forget the sight of her diving in, red and blue and radiant, to slam Yon-Rogg’s ship out of the sky. 

She lands the quadjet in the yard, and Fury climbs into the back to help the Skrulls out of the hold. Carol’s already waiting for them on the ground, and when Maria pops the canopy she offers a hand to help her out of the plane. And as soon as she sees Carol’s face, she knows. She can see it in every line of Carol’s body – she remembers who she is, who Maria is, what they _were_.

“Looked pretty hot up there,” Maria says, and Carol laughs a little and pulls her into a fierce hug.

“Nice flying,” Carol says. Her hair still smells like ozone, like falling out of atmosphere. “I forgot how good you make that look.”

Wrapped in Carol’s arms, she can feel the warmth of her skin through her suit, feel her heart racing, feel how alive she is. It’s not that she hasn’t believed it, the last two days since Carol turned up in her yard like a ghost in a borrowed shirt, but for the first time it feels real. And then Carol pauses, and pulls back a little. 

“I know it’s been a long time,” Carol says softly. “Is this still…”

They had always been careful where other people could see them. They both had too much at stake – their careers, custody of Monica, too many things they could lose if the wrong people found out. At the time it had been a sacrifice she could live with, not the first she’d had to make to go after what she wanted, not the last either. And then Carol was gone. Carol was gone, and every time someone offered her condolences like she’d lost a friend and not half of her soul, all she could think about was all the time she’d wasted not kissing her every chance she had, to hell with everyone else.

“Lot of things have changed,” she answers. She reaches up, and cups Carol’s face in her hand. “But this hasn’t.” And she kisses her like she’s spent the last six years wishing she could.

Carol kisses back like she’s trying to make up for lost time, desperate and eager, leaning into it until she has Maria pinned against the side of the plane. She can feel every place they’re touching and it’s still not enough; she twists her hand in Carol’s wind-blown hair and drags her deeper, pressing against her until they are both breathless and flushed. 

“Wow,” Carol says when they finally pull apart again, and her smile is exactly the one that Maria remembers from the last time she kissed her, and thought she would never see again.

Fury coughs behind them, and Carol doesn’t bother to turn around, just raises a finger. 

Maria would happily stay here for the rest of the day – the rest of her life – kissing Carol, the familiar-unfamiliar taste of her on her tongue. But there are other things they have to do – find room in the house for a cruiser’s worth of refugees, treat Talos’ wounds, call her parents and tell them she’s alive and they can bring Monica home – and reluctantly they manage to untangle themselves. She glances at Fury to see if he has anything smart to say, but for once he has the sense to keep his mouth shut. And when she looks over at the Skrulls, who are huddled around the back of the jet staring at the Louisiana trees like people who have spent the last decade hiding out in space, Soren catches her eye and smiles faintly at her, and Maria knows she at least understands.

It takes them the rest of the afternoon to sort out all the most pressing issues, and then her parents drop Monica off and they have to catch her up on everything that happened – the PG edition, anyway – and introduce her to their guests, and answer a barrage of questions. In all the chaos there’s no chance for her and Carol to get alone together, but every time they’re close she can feel the spark between them, the aching need to reach out and touch her. And when she goes to bed that night, after they’ve cleared the spare room and the living room for Fury and the Skrulls and rolled out a sleeping bag on Monica’s floor for Talos’ daughter, Carol goes with her.

*

There’s a warm spot in the sheets next to Maria when she wakes up, and for a second she almost lets herself think it’s Carol, before she remembers that Carol is – right there. Sitting cross-legged on the comforter, wearing one of Maria’s t-shirts, her hair still messy from the night before. They’ve spent every night together since they got back from Mar-Vell’s ship – reminding each other who they were before this happened, re-learning who they are now – but Maria still isn’t used to waking up together. 

Back then it had been rare for both of them to have a chance to sleep in, and Carol always used to be the first one up, ready to hit the ground running. But right now she seems content to sit, washed in the early morning sun, and watch Maria sleep like she’s trying to memorize her face.

“I can hear you thinking,” Maria says, stretching her arms out over her head as she sits up. 

“I’m sorry I can’t stay longer,” Carol says, and Maria wonders how long she’s been sitting there, waiting for her to wake up. “I hate leaving you guys again so soon, but…”

“But you have to go take on the entire Kree Empire on your own.” 

Carol shakes her head. “What they did to the Skrulls – they’ve done it to other worlds. They’re still doing it. They won’t stop. But I can stop them.”

Maria reaches out and brushes a strand of hair out of Carol’s face. In Mar-Vell’s lab she had lit up like a binary star, but Maria doesn’t think Carol has ever looked as beautiful as she does right now. 

“Hey,” she says. “You know this is why I love you, right? Because I know that if you go out there to fight an alien space empire, you’re going to win.”

“They’ll never know what hit them,” Carol replies, smiling crookedly.

Maria shoots a pointed look at Carol’s suit, draped over a chair in the corner of the room where she left it. “I think they’ll know.”

She hates that she can’t keep this. She buried Carol and grieved her once already, and part of her just wants to hold onto her and never let her go. But she knew as soon as Carol said that she would go with the Skrulls that she couldn’t ask her to stay. Her heart will always belong to the woman who got into the plane because she knew lives were at stake, even when it hurts.

“Just tell me you’ll come home,” Maria says. 

“Always,” Carol answers without hesitation. “Now that I remember where it is.”

Maria leans forward and presses Carol back onto the bed, following her down and curling around her. She can feel Carol’s breath rising and falling under her chest, getting faster as she trails kisses down her throat. She pins her hands to the sheets, and feels Carol’s fingers tighten in her grip, clinging to her with even more strength than she remembers.

She can’t keep this, not exactly the way it was. But Carol's still here now, and she can use every second she has left to fix this in their memories. To make sure Carol never forgets, while she’s out there saving planets, how much she’s loved here. How much she has to come home to.


End file.
